Old college friends post links to reviews of it on my Facebook wall and say things like, “Sounds like something you’d like,” or “This reminded me of you.” I think, Am I supposed to like this? I don’t, in fact, like it. I dislike it. Where is my dislike button? Where do I click to scream?
I go to my therapist and say, “Why is being single the only thing people think of when they think of me? I’m other things, too.”
And this delights her, this old, wry, wrinkled, brainy bitch. This feels like a breakthrough, at the very least a valuable exercise, a teachable moment. Something. This is a change in our conversation. An assertion is being made, a thesis statement about my life, finally. “Tell me who you are, then,” she says. “What other statements are true?”
“Well, I’m a woman,” I say.
“Good, yes.”
“I work in advertising as a designer.”
“Yes.”
“I’m technically a Jew.”
“OK.”
“I’m a New Yorker.”
I start to feel unsettled. Surely I am more than that.
“I’m a friend,” I say. “I’m a daughter, I’m a sister, I’m an aunt.” Those things feel farther away lately, but they exist as part of my identity.
In my head I think:
I’m alone.
I’m a drinker.
I’m a former artist.
I’m a shrieker in bed.
I’m the captain of the sinking ship that is my flesh.
To my therapist I say, “I’m a brunette.”
I go out on a date with a man I meet online and it does not go well. Although there’s a certain pleasure I take in not being the one who drinks too much on the date, it’s only momentary, because I still have to contend with a drunk, I still have to spend time with this man, monitor whether he’ll be hostile or joyful. I have to step outside myself. This is not a date; this is an audition for a play about a terrible date.
He’s two bourbons in by the time I arrive, and I’m patient but then sour about it when I feel that he’s touching me too much. He’s too familiar, too presumptuous, and also he’s wearing a turtleneck and he does not have the right head for a turtleneck, or maybe it’s just his chin, or his mouth, I don’t even know, I mean I just can’t with that turtleneck. And then, as we part ways, he asks me if I’ve read it, read the book. I say, “No, have you?” And he says, “No, I don’t read a lot,” and I think, Quelle surprise. And then he adds, “But I can tell it’s totally about you.” And I say, “You’re single too, why isn’t it about you?” And he says, “Oh, this? This is just temporary for me.”
The permanence of my impermanence. I stand in possession of it. I stand before him at the entrance to a subway station, in possession of nothing but myself. Myself is everything, I want to tell him. But to him it is nothing, because that’s how he feels about himself right now. He is alone, and so he is nothing. How do I explain to him that what applies to him does not apply to me? His context is not my context. How do you blow up the bus you’ve been forced to ride your entire life? It wasn’t your fault there were no other means of transportation available.
“You should read it,” he says, and I swat him in the arm with my purse as if I have been assaulted and want him to leave me alone. I exit the scene, audition over, and he yells after me his final line: “Hey, what was that for?” If he called me a bitch, I can’t recall hearing it now. It was probably under his breath. A last-minute improvisation.
I never read the book. I leave it in the laundry room of my apartment building, and it is gone the next time I return. My mother doesn’t ask about it again. Her assessment of my burdens is ever-changing. Singleness forgotten for the moment.
Let’s forget it, shall we? Can we all just talk about something else, please?
Indigo Gets Married
I fly to Seattle, by myself, to go to my friend Indigo’s wedding. She was one of the first work friends I made when I started in advertising, and we drank together at happy hour events in midtown practically every Thursday night for several years, and even took a few vacations together, just weekends away, but still. Her mother is Trinidadian and her father is white and everywhere I went with her, men would tell her she was “exotic,” and she would always reply, “I am not a bird or a flower, I am a human being.” She eventually quit her job to become a yoga instructor, but she is marrying a rich man, so she works only part-time. Nevertheless, they throw a hippie wedding, or at least it has the trappings of one. They are both barefoot. There are wildflowers everywhere. Her dress appears to be in tatters. We are in someone’s backyard, although this particular backyard has a view of Puget Sound.
I sit at the singles table under a nest of twinkling lights and grape leaves. There are four other single women at the table: two of them are lesbians, who are best friends with each other and seem invested in gossiping about everyone they went to college with; one of them is a retired nun, whose story remains mysterious throughout the night; and the fourth woman is Karen, a real career gal. I say this not to make fun of her but because she described herself as such, which means it is doubly true. There are two gay men at the table, who used to date and are using the evening as an opportunity to hash out a few things, and there are two straight men: a newly divorced uncle of the groom named Warren, and a tall, broad, masculine man named Kurt, who works at the corporate headquarters of the Seattle Mariners.
I watch Karen get toasted quickly on Sancerre, and Kurt joins her, but he’s drinking Scotch. They flirt heavily, shamelessly, nearly professionally, and it feels like we are no longer at a wedding but instead are at a bar, and there is a basket of popcorn in front of them and a sports show playing noiselessly on a television set and a jukebox that keeps igniting itself every fifteen minutes with a bouncy, Auto-Tuned pop song. Warren and I sit back and watch them flirt, our own kind of flirtation. It is like we are on a double date with them, only we hate them.
“Get a real eyeful,” I say to Warren. “This is what you have to look forward to now.”
Warren laughs at me. He is in his early fifties and has a smooth, calm demeanor, and he has all of his hair, graying at the temples, and he is rich like his nephew who is marrying my friend Indigo. He tells me he just joined a hiking club. “I used to do it with my wife, and then I was doing it by myself, but I think I’d like to do it with other people sometimes,” he says. His arms are tanned and lean. He also tells me he got a dog six months ago, and they go to the park every morning. Just having that dog waiting for him when he gets home is helping him get through this trying time. “I’m glad you got a dog,” I say.